Featured Domains

EPP automates many .AI transactions people take for granted with other domains.

Anguilla’s country code domain name .AI has become popular in recent years thanks to artificial intelligence companies. Now the domain has a bit of intelligence itself.

The domain name registry has moved to the Council of Country Code Administrators (CoCCA) platform, which means that many transactions that were previously manual can be achieved using Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP).

Previously, registrars had to perform transactions on a .AI web page. Many updates were handled manually by the registry, which is managed by one person on the tiny island of 15,000 people. Nameserver updates were performed once a day on weekdays, for example.

Moving to CoCCA might also give the registry more resiliency in its DNS infrastructure.

As part of the move to CoCCA, individuals can no longer register domains directly through the registry. Since many registrars already offer domains on CoCCA, you can expect more to start offering .AI domain names for sale. One such registrar that recently added .AI is Hexonet (1api). A full list of supporting registrars is here.

Domain names can be transferred between registrars. However, there is a transfer fee equal to a new registration that does not add years to the registration. So it’s unlikely people will transfer registrars to get lower registration fees.

.CM, the country code top level domain name for The Republic of Cameroon, has a storied history amongst domainers. Kevin Ham struck a deal to wildcard the domain name, sending lots of typo traffic of .com domain names his way. Ham, including his deal with Cameroon, was the subject of a cover story in the late Business 2.0 magazine.

This year Cameroon decided to open up .cm and offer it to individual registrants, and opted to auction off the best names, such as Sex.cm. What followed was an unqualified disaster.

First, it took longer than expected to get the registry set up due to a host of technical problems. As the go-live date neared, Council of Country Code Administrators Incorporated (CoCCA), which was to run the registry for .cm, continued to be concerned with .cm’s DNS. The DNS was to be run by Cameroon’s telecom company rather than an established player. Without CoCCA’s blessing to go live, Cameroon decided to run its own copy of the registry software.

Then the auctions occurred on NameJet. It looked like a big success as Sex.cm auctioned for $51,300 and Free.cm for $17,800. But then the bottom fell out. Bidders got cold feet as they lost confidence in .cm typo traffic as well as the registry as a whole. They backed out of their bids. Sex.cm ended up trading hands for only $21,700 (see comments, it actually sold for less) and Free.cm went for a dismal $310. Ouch.